PLEASE DO NOT SHOW THIS PORTFOLIO IN CLASS
Self-Similarity
Pink Floyd
Muse
Comparising “Comfortably Numb” and “Supermassive Black Hole”
Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb from the 70s and Muse’s are both classic rock songs and share some similarities as can be seen in their self-similarity matrices.
Patterns that emerge from the chroma-based self-similarity matrices are short dark diagonal paths. Especially looking a Muse’s song we can clearly see the same blocks with these paths each time the pre-chorus and chorus play. The darker blocks are the verses characterized as a riff with vocals. The timbre-based changes show comparable patterns but have a clear difference around the 2:30. This is when the guitar solo plays and is clearly unique from other parts of the song.
Introduction
Comparing the Rock genre over fours decades 60s-10s
Spotify has 6 playlist called the XXs Rock Anthems for the decades 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, and 10s. I’m interested in how rock has evolved from the 60s to the 10s. Multiple bands have made music spanning more than one decade and I would like to investigate how their earlier work compares to their later works and whether bands have influenced each other. Moreover when large subgenres of rock started to appear and which bands were responsible. There are three main groups to compare: the early bands from the 60s and 70s, the middle 80 and 90s bands, and late 00s and 10s.
The use of more digital elements in music will probably increase over the years, and more subgenres are likely to have emerged over the years. I am unsure in what way the bands have influenced each other if any at all.
The tracks are all popular songs from their respective time periods but not all songs are original. Especially among the older songs are a lot of remastered versions. Another downside is the small amount of songs representing a complete decade of song releases.
Atypical bands might be bands like Queen which is known for releasing songs in a multitude of genres and bands that have released albums spanning multiple decades. Typical bands might be bands like U2 that appear in one playlist with multiple songs.
Analysis
The corpus
The current corpus has a lack of data representing the last two decades and the 90s are over-represented. Furthermore the current data might not be the best to represent the decennia since they have not yet been verified using the hit-charts of their respective decade.
Acousticness
The current data shows that over the years the acousticness has significantly decreased. From the 1980s a significant drop in acousticness can be seen in the data. The 1960s and 1970s show a wide distribution which narrows and shifts towards no acousticness at all. The 2000s seems the decade with the least acousticness as even the outliers don’t exceed 0.12 on the scale. The 2010s see the acoustic outliers returning with “Way down We Go” from KALEO as most acoustic song.
The distribution along the modes don’t seem to have a significant preference for more or less acousticness only the 1960s and 1980s show dissimilar distributions per mode. Minor songs favor more acousticsness in the 1960s and the 1980s is reversed, favoring less acousticness.
Valence
The valence appears to barely have changed in the first three decades with a small drop to the last three decades.
Loudness & Energy
Comparing the energy related to loudness per decade show very similar clouds of data points. The 2000s and 2010s appear to lack songs in the lower ranges of loudness but this could be due to the fact that the playlists have less data points.